Now I’m not an MMORPGer (for the non-nerds out there, MMORPG is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Dungeons and Dragons ported to the Internet with pretty graphics.) This is not because of some inherent virtue. I might be very well have become one if I had a little more free time in my life or if I had started taking amphetamines, since God only knows I can’t really sacrifice anymore sleep than I already do. But that is another rant.

I thought I had mentioned this before, but I can’t find it in my blog archives. In any case, I swear it seems like sometimes my iPod can read what mood I’m in. On my 2 hour trip back from L.A., it kept pulling up all these down-tempo, super-chill, and melancholy, reflective songs, and while this cheesy song by a Filipino American group may not really fall into this category, it is attached to a somewhat melancholy memory.

I guess you could say that “Time after Time” is one of my most favorite songs, and I have different cover versions of it attached to various memories. For example, the version by INOJ is attached to the summer after graduating from college, when I tried lingering in the Bay Area, but then ended up going home in defeat. Now that was an extremely depressing time. This was also the time when A and E (whom I mentioned in the previous post) finally actually got together, and I remember hanging out with them and feeling superfluous and stupid. Ah memoreez.

One would be hard pressed to convince me that anti-immigrant sentiments are not synonymous with outright racism. The arguments that immigration foes posit are specious at best. The whole, “they’re taking our jobs” idea just doesn’t fly. I really don’t see too many white people lining up for a back-breaking season of crop harvesting or signing up to clean out rich people’s toilets. These aren’t jobs that white people want, although in a lot of cases, they are jobs that need to be done. A more informed argument is the idea that we have to discourage them from taking these jobs because it only encourages rich bastards to pay workers poorly. There is a lot of truth in this. The problem is that (1) it doesn’t directly address how we can get the rich bastards to pay decent wages and (2) it doesn’t address the economic pressures that drives people from developing countries to find jobs in the U.S. And, realistically, I just don’t see people voluntarily paying top dollar for their lettuce and tomatoes just so my black and brown brothers and sisters can have a living wage, undocumented or no.

Man, this totally sucks. It’s 1:30 a.m. and I can’t get to sleep. Of course, this means that now I am screwing around with the new blogging engine. As you can tell from the header, things aren’t exactly fixed quite yet, and probably won’t be tonight this morning unless I decide not to sleep at all.

Wow, this post is going to be extraordinarily geeky. By clicking on various links, I stumbled upon some very well thought out posts regarding the inexorable programming language clashes that in reality actually affects the average Net dependent webhead in ways that may not be readily apparent.

I find myself missing emacs, which is clearly a sign of pathology. The silly thing is that I clearly don’t use even 10% of its features. It’s pure nostalgia. Emacs is the only editor (aside from Vi, I suppose) that I’ve been able to run consistently on all the platforms I’ve blogged on—Windows, Linux, Mac OS X. (Yes, I’ve blogged while using Windows, but only as a stop-gap measure.) I haven’t really ever used emacs for something that I couldn’t do with whatever basic text editor comes with the OS (Notepad, GNU nano, Textedit.app—although, interestingly, of these OSes, emacs comes preinstalled only on Mac OS X—in many Linux distros, you actually have to manually install it. Of course, these are the distros that favor Vi—emacs vs. vi is probably one of the oldest computing holy wars around.) I suppose there is something masochistically perverse about having to type CTRL-X CTRL-C to quit. (I still remember the first time I was faced with an empty emacs buffer in 1994, and I had to bug my UNIX guru college roommate to help me regain control of my machine—an already old-at-the-time 486 running at a paltry 50 MHz. Don’t laugh, I’ve computed on machines running at 1 MHz. Machines that you can actually play some pretty neat games on.)

As I mentioned previously, I find myself conflicted about having my blog posts live in a database. And, really, I don’t see that much difference between a blog post and a generic XML file. (As I mentioned, I wish I could write posts in XML.) I feel that blog posts, like generic XML, don’t map naturally to a relational database, particularly if you want to have fine-grained access to individual elements. Matt Liotta and Chris Preimesberger discuss the possible performance problems you might run into by trying to store XML in an RDBMS, and how a more elegant solution lies in native XML databases that can be queried in more natural (at least for XML) XPath and XQuery instead of SQL. As the name implies, XPath (which XQuery utilizes) has a lot in common with file-system paths. Consider that the browser’s location field is better suited to handling a file-system path than a query written in SQL (and file-system paths are in fact how most blogs are queried—whether by date or category, regardless of whether the blog engine stores posts on the filesystem or in a database.) And, especially in a shared-hosting situation, I don’t know if a database really gets you all that much more performance than simply dealing with the file-system. Then again, considering that I don’t find hierarchical categories all that useful, I don’t know if paths are all that great either, except for accessing specific elements in an XML document. Decisions, decisions.

I am, ultimately, an idealist. However, I can understand that there are limits to trying to achieve utopia. There are physical laws—thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics—that make certain things impossible. But when someone tells me that something is impossible because of the recalcitrance of human nature, I call bullshit.

After reading these suggestions for the improvement of Mac OS X, I can’t help but think of the manager in “Fight Club” who asks “Can I get this icon in cornflower?” Cosmetic changes, while entertaining, do not an OS major revision make, and can sometimes even break it. Now I’m no Cocoa guru, but if the APIs are exposed, maybe what would be more reasonable is for someone who is not necessarily Apple write a viable Dock or Finder replacement (and at least for Finder, I believe there are already a few around, although the best ones are not free, either as in beer, or as in speech.) Why does the OS itself have to contain millions of bits and pieces that are not essential to an OS?

Bah. Another reason why I distrust all this stuff-it-into-a-database business. On one of my last posts, I think I may have missed a closing quotation mark, or maybe a closing angle-bracket. Which will understandably make the rest of the post unreadable. Unfortunately, because I am using the built-in text-editor for Wordpress, the editor decided to url-escape everything after the mistake. While I was able to extract meaningful text from some of it, some of it simply fell into /dev/null, never to be seen again.

So I went to the new Tommy’s in San Diego on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard between the 805 and the 163. It, like the Tommy’s in Hollywood (on Hollywood Blvd.), has an indoor sit-down place to eat, unfortunately essentially resembling an In-n-Out.

But I think we all know this already. I was perusing an article entitled On having layout, and I am appalled by absurd inner workings of IE. Man, screw this madness. Designers should design solely for pure CSS and XHTML. There is a quote in there that I find incredibly disturbing—is this just something that folks who design for IE subscribe to, or is this philosophy applicable to software engineers who design Windows software?

Now I haven’t read Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Prince yet, but I stumbled upon the concept of the Horcrux randomly following links. The concept is familiar to any J.R.R. Tolkien fan, and clearly, there is at least one way known to create a Horcrux.

This article is stupid. It discusses the evolutionary advantage of a patriarchal society, with definite disregard for the value of human life. While it is true that a rapidly growing society tends to overwhelm less rapidly growing societies, this article completely disregards the reasons—both biological and economic—why population growth slows. My feeling is that the natural tendency of populations is to grow rapidly. And while we have, for the most part, in industrialized nations, made the specter of starvation less prominent (although we all know people in the U.S. who are citizens who are starving), what we have not gotten a handle on is the cost of generating children.

I was just thinking, with regards to my post about paternalistic societies and how some people keep using word that word, and I do not think it means what they think it means. What is probably even better for Empire building is a maternalistic society.

I had thought that I had written something about some long time ago, but I guess I haven’t. (Although I must admit, I don’t really feel like digging through my entire blog archive.) I admit, I haven’t watched “Nausicaa” in a while, but I think my favorite Miyazaki movie is “Spirited Away”.

I have always been someone who backs the underdog and have very little use for the de facto Establishment. I am, perhaps, overly idealistic and at times unreasonably dogmatic, but this instinct has driven many of my trivial and not-so-trivial decisions. For example, OS choice: so it was that I decided to run with Linux in 1998 sucked into the Open Source hype, then Mac OS X in 2002, still attached to GTK and GNOME apps. I had long grown weary of Microsoft and their works. Browser choice: I continued to use Netscape, then Mozilla, then Galeon, then Camino, eschewing the bug-laden, unfixable mess that is IE (and while IE on the Mac is much nicer than its Windows counterpart, it is now ancient) I continue to be a resolute Dodger fan, and can’t help but find the Cubs endearing. And I chose Pediatrics as my specialty, because I want to help those who can’t help themselves—that is the nature of children, for one thing, and I feel that pediatricians tend to work more with underserved populations: minorities, immigrants, the undocumented.

Issa reminds me about Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whom I actually randomly met in the U.S. when she was still a Senator, trying to push extraordinarily broad suffrage—where even Filipino Americans who have long been U.S. citizens would be allowed to vote. I remember parts of an interesting conversation with her daughter, which would be quite typical amongst people in their late teens, but which has interesting undertones in someone involved in politics, in fact, whose family has been a political dynasty. (Like George W Bush, GMA is the daughter of a former president.) We were discussing how it is that our parents have so much say in our destiny when it comes to choosing what we end up doing in our lives. In my own case, for example, it is no accident that I ended up in health care. Both my parents are in health care, and so are almost all of my aunts. I swear it wasn’t until I was almost in college that I realized that there were other careers available out there in the world. But I wonder about what that means for someone who is part of a political family. Do you feel inexorably driven to do the same, to seek the power and the responsibility of leading?

Watching this on cable right now. The soundtrack is awesome. It sounds like a cRPG soundtrack, like an early Final Fantasy. I dig the electronic underpinnings that, while echoing the disco feel carried out of the ‘70’s into the early ‘80’s, also reminds me of the sound chips of the early microcomputers/personal computers like the SID chip of the Commodore 64 and the more primitive sound generators found in other 8-bit classic machines like the Atari 400, the Apple IIc, and the Nintendo Entertainment System.

My dream (heh, that sounds really bizarre and grandiose but there it is) is to write a blogging engine that is centered around entries written in a custom XML language and transforming it to XHTML and RSS via XSLT. The only real reason I’d like to do this is because I spent an awful amount of time learning XML and XSLT back in the day and I think it would let me do things that I otherwise am not able to do easily without massive amounts of perl kludgery.

I was walking through the Science Fiction and Fantasy section of the Borders in Glendale when a totally random thought occurred to me. I think what brought it to my mind is the question: what is the cause of evil? I was flipping through random fantasy novels where characters are neatly pigeon-holed into Good or Evil, and clearly in the real world nothing is that obvious.

Now I know that there are plenty of months that have 31 days in them, but for some reason, March seemed unbearably long. I don’t know if it’s simply the fact that it’s Lent and like the good brainwashed Catholic that I am, I feel like I’ve been sent into exile to the Desert, bandying words with the Devil himself.